AMD & Intel Chips Banned In China
Sounds big, but what does it MEAN?
That China is going to block the use of AMD AND Intel chips really caught my eye, but as always there’s a lot of nuance behind that. Here’s what got me started looking.
Not clear in the title of this first video is that this is in GOVERNMENT USE SYSTEMS ONLY. It’s obviously a slap at the TikTok ban, given the timing.
Keep in mind China can’t build much of anything without the assistance of companies like ASML. The surprise for me in this video was learning that Hygon has everything they need to manufacture AMD Zen 1 architecture chips. This is a seven year old 14 nanometer SOC (system on a chip) device meant for the lower end of the market. They do have my nemesis, the AVX2 instruction set, but they require two cycles per instruction whereas Intel does it with one. Last year’s Hygon C86 3250 8 code chip scores a Passmark of 11114. This chip is a fair match against the Intel Xeon E5-2630v3, which premiered in 2014.
So what China has is as expected - lower end and a decade behind. They can keep doing these, perhaps shorting AMD on licensing payments, if things get sticky, but not TOO sticky.
The other alternative they have is shifting to arm (yes, lowercase, the goofballs). The Advanced RISC Machines processor designs are licensed to others, they got their start in small mobile devices, and now Apple has switched their M1/M2/M3 Macs to arm. There are also extremely high end options for datacenter duty, machines with 128 cores that are just as fast as any AMD or Intel product.
The architecture change would get them a LITTLE more wiggle room.
All in all, seems like a tempest in a teacup. Reasons?
Not a huge portion of the market.
Enterprise PCs often get rolled on a three year depreciation cycle, while government agencies typically try to milk theirs for more.
They’ll push immediate need purchases right now, the ban doesn’t start until 2025. There will be a lot of things that get delayed.
Given their overall finances, I should maybe say A LOT OF THINGS WILL GET DELAYED.
Any ban like this is gonna leak as much as needed for things to remain steady state.
Russia, coming from a place of deep security concerns, tried to launch the Baikal processor. Maybe you can actually get an Elbrus-2S+ or an Elbrus-8S, I dunno, they’re obscure. The point here is that for modern electronics this year’s CPUs are a collective global effort. If you can’t stay in line, your supply will get impeded. This announcement from China is clickbait originating at the nation state cabinet level.